It is astonishing how violently a big branch shakes when a silly little bird has left it.
~ Katherine Mansfield, from “Alors, je pars.” in Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield
Photo of Common Redpoll (male) by Larissa Datsha
Workin’ WFH. With Yiyun Li.
April 4, 2020 by 74 Comments
WFH. (Work From Home). No shoes. No socks. Chained to the desk. Lower back groans.
HBR: “The risk is substantial. The lines between work and non-work are blurring… (those) who feel “on” all the time are at a higher risk of burnout when working from home than if they were going to the office as usual.”
I pause for a few page turns of Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life: “being caught by the mesh of one’s mind.”
Friday Night. 11:30 pm. Everyone in bed – but me. I’ve shifted positions, from desk to couch. I’m clearing out a swollen email box. 214. 210. 198. 175. 143. 138. 117. 18 hours. Calls. Conference Calls. Conference Calls. Conference Calls. 110. 108. 106. 104. 101. 99.
Get up to stretch. Walk to the kitchen. Grab a ramekin. Scoop out 3 heaping tablespoons of Talenti, tamp it down, lean in on the spoon again, add another scoop. Today, Talenti for late breakfast, for dinner, and again, now, at midnight. Mint Chocolate chip. Close eyes. Gelato slides down throat, soothing. The only thing that is.
88. 85. 84. 83. Losing focus. Re-reading same email 2x. Replies are littered with spelling mistakes. Autocorrect, correcting incorrectly. F-** it. I send it anyway. Does it really matter. Lose. Loose. Lose.
81. 79. 64.
Back to Yiyun Li. “Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.”
63. 62. 59. 57. 56. 54. 53. Li: “Wanting nothing is as extreme as wanting everything.”
50. 47. 43. 41. Li: “Did we ever ask ourselves: Why are we so lonely, so proud, and so adamant about perfecting our pretense?”
40. 39. 38. 37. 34. 32. Li: “we are, unlike other species, capable of not only enlarging but also diminishing our precarious selves”
30. 29. 27. I’m closing in on clearing my cue, but like Sisyphus, the closer I get to zero, the steeper the hill seems to get.
26. 25. 24. 23. Neck aches. I mean aches. I turn, twist to adjust my position. 23 left. Come on. Bring it home.
I stare at the remaining cue. And stare. And stare.
And quit.
I gently set my iPhone on night stand. Twist in the earbuds, skim to find Chill Playlist, and hit Play. But Yiyun Li can’t help herself, and lip syncs over it.
…the worst kind of fidgeting is that of one’s mind…I wonder…—not that one has known…but that one knows…This ceaseless effort—
Notes: Photo – Shibari & Photo Geoffroy Tako Baud. Model Lafille Delair (via Newthom)
Driving I-95 South. Baptized without God.
October 19, 2019 by 65 Comments
5:33 am. Friday morning.
Google Maps signals 17 minutes to destination. Smooth ride, cruising down I-95 South. Truckers, insomniacs, and DK listening to Audible, his book on tape. More Terry Tempest Williams, her new book, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. Terry’s way in my head, and beyond, and yes, we’re on a first name basis now. “Our undoing is also our becoming. I have come to believe this is a good thing.”
The Heads-up Display on the windshield flashes alert: Object ahead on highway. It flashes an alert again. I tap the brakes.
A wind gust blows leaves across three lanes. I exhale. Wonders of technology. Car warns you about objects on highway, or if you veer outside your lane. I’m listening to books on tape, beamed from the cloud. GPS tells me how long to the office. And I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday.
The car wobbles over uneven pavement. 4000 pounds of car, wearing grooves into the asphalt, with my back and forth 4-5 days a week.
Read somewhere from a survey that 85% of us wished to travel more. And that one in 10 Americans surveyed say they have no interest in going anywhere. Welcome readers, to Me, I’m on top of this stack of 10. [Read more…]
Lightly child, lightly
August 29, 2019 by 34 Comments
We start out wanting everything, never imagining how much everything weighs. Then we can’t swallow things that eat at our gut. We call this integrity. Then one by one, we’re forced to put things down in order to go on. Like a bird dropping food three times its size in order to fly.
~ Mark Nepo, from “How to Empty” in Things That Join the Sea and the Sky: Field Notes on Living
Notes:
- Photo: (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
Lightly child, lightly
August 22, 2019 by 10 Comments
Laurel had embarked on this photo project that involved trying to take portraits of people, at night, who were distantly related to her through DNA. She went online, to sites like 23andMe and Ancestry.com and located people who were listed as cousins or distant relations of some kind, and then she approached these people and asked if they would allow her to take their picture. She ended up doing hundreds of these images… I loved her DNA project, which breaks down ideas of race and family until they are no longer operative in the normally simplistic ways that we talk about them in our cultural discussions. Laurel’s “family” as described by the DNA portraits transcended class, generation, race, political belief, region, and every other boundary you could erect in which to wall off your “family” from those other people out there at the edge of your property. She photographed gun-toting Republicans in the South, and Democratic African American union guys not too many states away. She shot Mennonites in Oregon. She shot Jews in Queens. The American family, in Laurel’s project, could be anywhere, at any time, and the responsibility to love them and treat them with respect, therefore, extended outward into the unexplored expanses beyond home, until home was in every direction.
~ Rick Moody, The Long Accomplishment: A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony (August 6, 2019)
Notes:
- Poem – Thank you Karl @ Mindfulbalance.
- Photo: “Tyler, Texas #1, 2013” by Laurel Nakadate, Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York from Slate: “The Photographer Is Related to All of These Strangers“
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
Lightly child, lightly
August 15, 2019 by 32 Comments
Don’t you wish they would stop,
all the thoughts swirling around in your head,
bees in a hive, dancers tapping their way across the stage.
I should rake the leaves in the carport, buy Christmas lights.
Was there really life on Mars? What will I cook for dinner?
I walk up the driveway, put out the garbage bins…
Does the car need oil, again? There’s a hole in the ozone
the size of Texas, and everything seems to be speeding up.
Come, let’s stand by the window and look out
at the light on the field. Let’s watch how
the clouds cover the sun, and almost nothing
stirs in the grass.
~ Danusha Lameris, from “Thinking” from The Moons of August
Notes:
- Poem – Thank you Karl @ Mindfulbalance. Photo: Moon gazing at Max Patch, North Carolina by Paolo Nacpil
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
It’s been a long day
July 25, 2019 by 22 Comments
Someone’s life,
their attainments
(forgetting that nine-tenths of it is lived on the inside)…
~ A. K. Benjamin, Let Me Not Be Mad: My Story of Unraveling Mind (Dutton, June 11, 2019)
Photo by Jamie Schafer via (aberrant beauty). Related Posts: It’s been a long day
(Sleep) Walking. Into Saturday Morning.
July 6, 2019 by 45 Comments
Friday night. Netflix movie. Two handfuls of shelled pistachios. Heaping bowl of Nacho Cheese Doritos. 3 scoops of The Fixer, Talenti’s Mint-Chocolate Chip gelato.
Full shot? Or half shot? After effects: Groggy to semi-groggy. I bite down on the smooth, egg shell blue Tylenol PM pill, snap it in half. Toss one half back and place the other half on my tongue. I cup hand under the running water, scoop it into my mouth, throw my head back, and chase it down. Do your thing Girl, do your thing.
I flip through blog feeds, Apple News Feed, Google News feed and RSS feeds. A quick peek at work emails. And then on to Kindle. I wade through the last two chapters of A. K. Benjamin’s Let Me Not Be Mad: My Story of Unraveling Mind. Turn the last page of the book, and pause. Why this book, this title, at this time, out of the millions of Kindle options. Benjamin’s words: “Words never surpass the bliss of breathing. Place hand through head: no brain, no mind, no hand” and “I could walk over London Bridge in rush hour, faces thronging around me, and diagnose each one in an instant: Psychosis … Depression … Lewy bodies … Panic … Depression … Sociopathy … OCD … Cynophobia … Panic … Guam’s … Everybody has something.”
Everybody has something…
Just give me 7 hours, 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep.
And then this somebody will deal with that something, and that everything.
Notes:
- Inspired by: Michael Wade in his post: “The Day” …”Firm Ground Rule: Do Everything Slowly.
- Inspired by: “Recreation, love, spirituality—each turned into work: This is how we cope …A current darling of neuroscience research—the cultivation of default-mode networks—indicates that our brains need mindlessness, unemployment, f*$king about, eating mental crisps, in order to thrive. ~ A. K. Benjamin, Let Me Not Be Mad: My Story of Unraveling Mind (Dutton, June 11, 2019)
- Photo: Wes Sumner (San Francisco, CA) (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
July 1, 2019 by 10 Comments
“So, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?”
I’d never heard that question before, hovering close to cliché and thumping me with its gravity at the same time…
“What do you think of the moment before you sleep?”…
“Why don’t you tell me about a dream?”…
“The dream is asking you the same question as I am, because it’s the only question . . .”
~ A. K. Benjamin, from his new book titled Let Me Not Be Mad: My Story of Unraveling Mind (Dutton, June 11, 2019)
Photo: (via poppins-me)
Driving I-95 S. With Hammer at Rest.
June 22, 2019 by 37 Comments
A nothingburger during a nondescript morning commute a month ago.
Not a Vuong nothing Moment that changed everything after it.
But it changed Something.
Why this particular Moment among the billions?
Why is it called up when it is?
And here IT comes again this morning.
This Moment. It’s pulled forward, to the front. Taking its right hand, sweeping aside the incessant swing of the Hammer on the searing molten metal, of not enough, not good enough and Now.
And it’s exactly at this Moment, when the Hammer rests, and Vuong’s luminescence offers its cooling respite.
It whispers listen, pay attention to This. And it hangs around until I do.
The pre-rush hour traffic on I-95 was detoured onto Exit 2. GPS routes me through Port Chester. I pull up to a stop light, and there they are.
Father and Son. Son, maybe 4 years old. Dad is wearing an overcoat, much too heavy for the season. Son looks up to his Dad, Dad bends over and picks him up, hugs him tight, then sets him down.
And they walk. Dad’s lunch box swinging in his left hand, his Son’s hand swinging in his right.
Let’s play it again Vuong. One more time.
The Hammer rests, for this Moment.
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